On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 3:13 PM, Michael Red <[email protected]> wrote:

> Woah, but did anyone look at the fact that, compared to a forum, immensely
> few people will join a mailing list unless they're VERY interested in it?


> I don't think we manage a post a day on average over a month for this
> mailing list, true. But by comparison, a forum would be much
> more...newbie-friendly, so to speak. I can't speak for any others, but I had
> to force myself to join the mailing list, because no forum was available.
> This is sufficient, sure.
>

See, it may be a generational thing, or something else, but I personally
find forums to be a pain in the neck, by comparison to a mailing list. This
lands neatly in my gmail, and gets filtered into its own directory, complete
with importance tagging. By contrast, I would have to manually navigate to a
forum and check it each day - which is not going to happen, given my time
commitments elsewhere.

It is the difference between a push-based event system, versus manual
polling, if you will.

Along the lines of suggestions, I think if we make a forum, it shouldn't be
> the grand central station every library tries to make theirs become. My
> opinion is that we should have a maximum of 3 sub-forums. One for
> announcements, one for developmental chatter (suggestions, ideas, preferably
> no issues since we have a bug tracker, and possibly dev chat for upcoming
> changes), one for posting projects made in pyglet.
>

My feelings on your 3 sub-forums are respectively:

- Any news channel where the user has to manually check for updates is a bad
way to do announcements: you want push notifications, not pull. RSS feeds
from an announcements forum isn't a terrible way to accomplish this, but the
mailing list already does push notifications very well.

- My experience is that the majority of programmers are very comfortable
with mailing lists, they tend to have limited time, and communicate from a
variety of devices (for example, my iPhone) where forums software is not
easily accessible.

- A projects-with-pyglet forum is a good idea, but it doesn't go far enough.
We need more visibility, like a gallery of (moderated) featured images
directly on the front page - you don't want to make potential contributors
have to mine down 3 levels of forum and trawl through the dross, just to
find interesting projects that use pyglet.



In case it isn't clear, I am not trying to be discouraging. If someone wants
to set up and manage forums, by all means go for it! I just have
reservations as to how useful it will be - and I certainly won't be using it
myself.

-- 
Tristam MacDonald
System Administrator, Suffolk University Math & CS Department
http://swiftcoder.wordpress.com/

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